Eating au Paradis

Today I open with a confession: I really, really don't know how to cook. First, there's the fact that I can't smell - I can't tell when things are burning, and my taste isn't nearly as sensitive as most people I might be cooking for. Secondly, I moved off to boarding school at 15 and proceeded to be on some sort of dining plan almost all the time until age 22. Thirdly, I'm just not that interested. Especially now that my sense of taste isn't that great, I really care mostly about texture and sweetness, so I can do cakes, cobblers, cookies, and basically anything that's loaded with sugar like a pro, but I've never bothered to improve my cooking skills much.

Not my momma's cookin'

Perhaps worst of all, growing up our diet was oftentimes hardly healthy. As Southerners were want to do, my family fried nearly everything, including our nice garden vegetables in the summer. We ate a lot of starch - above all corn and bleached white flour - but not nearly enough vegetables most of the year. And obviously we loved sugar, just obviously.
In spite of my years of body image issues and trying to diet myself to skinny, I never actually started to eat wholesome food until college, where the dining hall had lots of healthy stuff and I could force myself to like raw vegetables one leaf of spinach at a time. Eventually I became vegetarian to cut carbon emissions to my name, further distancing myself from my "home" diet. Eating differently, though, is different from cooking differently. As I weened myself off a meal plan I mostly had rice and beans or frozen vegetables, which is very balanced but not particularly adventurous. But hey, I didn't go to the Ivy League to become a chef.
At home, especially this last summer, I tried to take advantage of my parents' well-stocked kitchen to approach cooking the way I suppose any person my age who feels they don't know how to cook would: by trying recipes off the internet. My parents were just shocked that someone would ask them to eat so much green without any meat.

Flash forward to now, where I live on a beautiful tropical island, of which a solid percent is covered in fields. Surely I can find some way to be healthy here while enjoying the local cuisine, right? Problem: it's an island, and I'm allergic to fish and seafood. Most of the cuisine has fish and seafood in it. That which doesn't, including a great lentil stew that a friend of my supervisor let me try, has meat in it. The rest is mostly dessert an alcohol, based on restaurant menus, internet searches, cookbooks in gift shops, and conversations I've had with my supervisor. Except maybe soup.
I consider a plant-based diet to be more of my ideal, anywho, so why not just buy fresh veggies and chomp down? Since the bus freaking never comes, I can walk to a grocery store of some size in about 45 minutes, but they take a very laissez-faire approach to stocking: they have what they have, and when they don't have something, its bin is empty - can you imagine the riot that would happen if your local Wal-Mart was out of onions? Next, I sauntered over to a street market, where all the vendors have the same things for sale because the same plants get ripe in everybody's garden at the same time. Plus, I paid 6 euros for two avocados.

I strive to be as attractive as humanly
possible at all times.

I tried to bend my goals and cook lentils, a favorite here, even on the beach, made with locally-grown
supplemental vegetables based on a non-local recipe I found on the internet. Too bad I couldn't smell the lentils burning to the bottom of the pan and didn't realize the rock-hard surface my spoon was scraping as I stirred was not the bottom of the pan but a layer of blackened lentils. That added an interesting flavor.
Basically, I'm back to dried grain and beans and frozen vegetables, the most notable exception being that I'm eating entire avocados until they go out of season in a month or so.
Isn't that just exotic.